Ebenezer Scrooge in mortal apprehension, portrayed by George C. Scott. Fair use.
Why do we tingle when sleigh bells jingle? Why do we light up with joy when we see a tree lit up with colored bulbs? Why do we smile when Santa says, “Rudolph with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”
Why do we cringe when old Scrooge says “Bah! Humbug!”, and why do our eyes water when a new Scrooge brings a turkey to the Cratchitts?
Natalie Wood pulls Edmund Gwynn’s beard. Fair use.
What makes us tune in yet again to see Kris Kringle put on a Santa suit and treat Macy’s shoppers like real people?
Why do we hold our breath when Judy Garland sings to her kid sister, Margaret O’Brien, hoping against hope that her little Christmas will be merry after all?
What is it in us that appreciates apprentice angel Clarence’s appreciation of George Bailey’s character, even when George himself can’t see it?
Clarence and George. Public Domain.
Why do writers of books, movies, and songs always come back to Christmas? The Old Reliable. The fountain of innumerable waterworks.
Is Christmas, then, the last refuge of a scoundrel? Is it just a humbug—or is there some redeeming merit in it, after all?
Yes, Virginia
I think we love Christmas because we were made for a better life—a life we have lost sight of—and Christmas helps us see it again.
Adoration of the Shepherds. Dutch, Mathias Stomer, ca. 1650. Public Domain.
Christmas is when we commemorate God’s act of bringing love to the world, fixing up the broken toys we have made of our lives so they can work the way they were meant to.
This was such a big thought in the days of the Roman Empire that it took over a whole continent, resonating through two thousand years, echoing still today in our music, our drama, our popular entertainments—and in our humbler gatherings around the family fireside.
We know life can be better, and it doesn’t hurt once a year to be reminded of it, in powerful ways. In ways that resonate with our culture and our past experiences.
So by all means let’s enjoy our Tom-and-Jerrys, roast our chestnuts on an open fire, and shake our collective fingers at the Grinch.
But let’s never forget that a better life can be ours the other 364 days as well. That however gloomy things may seem at the moment, however much Despair may seem to reign over our affairs, there is a Greater Power at work behind the scenes.
It’s a Wonderful Life. Public Domain.
Call it what you will. I call it God. I call it Love. And I trust it will prevail.
There really are miracles, even on 34th Street. Someday soon we all will be together. It really is a wonderful life.
A church can be the voice of God in our bewildered lives.
Movie poster. Fair use.
In 1950, when Your New Favorite Writer was only five years old, along came The Next Voice You Hear, a film in which God breaks into radio broadcasts, leading people to re-examine their lives.
Its title came from a standard radio-era trope: A staff announcer’s preparation of the audience for an important message by saying, “The next voice you hear will be . . . .”
In this case, the movie implied, the next voice heard will be God, with a message for the world.
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The Christian church has always struggled to embody the voice of God for people on Earth.
In the High Middle Ages, people seemed to accept the notion that what the Holy Roman Catholic Church said, through priests and prelates, was God’s voice. If a pope said, “Go to Jerusalem and conquer it for Christianity,” that’s what people did. It was the voice of God.
Before long, people began to question that equation—mostly because, in the Reformation, “the Church” became two churches, then three. Then a thousand.
With a thousand churches saying different things, how could they all be the voice of God?
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Today, we have a different problem. Church membership, attendance, and affiliation by any metric you may choose, have all declined—inexorably, year by year, decade over decade.
In today’s society, it is inevitable that people will say, “Can any church speak for God?”
I am here to affirm, Dear Reader, that it can. See my statement above: “A church can be the voice of God in our bewildered lives.”
I’m not talking about doctrine. It was once common to suppose that a church could be exactly right—fully orthodox—in its theology. In which case, of course, it spoke with the voice of God.
Few people buy into that kind of thinking anymore.
Today, Christians are more likely to hew to an old biblical standard: “Ye shall know them by their fruits,” words spoken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
Permit me to amplify.
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The church where I worship may serve as an example: Heritage Congregational Church of Madison, Wisconsin.
Heritage was founded by a group of high-minded civic Christians in 1968. At that time approximately half of all Americans attended church, normally wearing their Sunday best. It was the classic 1950s church. Heritage had about three hundred members soon after it opened its doors.
Almost immediately, erosion began. Over five and a half decades, our membership dwindled until we are now down to 51 members, theoretically. That translates to an active core group of about two dozen who show up regularly for Sunday morning services and other church events.
Most of us are old. We have three “young” families—mom and dad in their early fifties plus children in their late teens or early twenties. The rest of us are in our seventies and eighties.
We are not getting any younger. By most reckonings, we ought to be what one old-time member used to call “tired roosters.”
Surprise: We are not.
I do not mean we never get tired. We do.
I do not mean we are whirling dervishes of liturgical and evangelical activism. We are not.
We are calm. We are patient. We are methodical.
We are full of faith, hope, and love.
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We were not always that way. We got to be that way. God made us that way.
Five years ago, we were a dying church.
We struggled to maintain a huge building far in excess of our needs for worship or any other purpose. Just to keep snow and ice from demolishing the roof was a serious drain on our energies. We always worried about money, mostly money to keep the building going.
Then covid hit. We couldn’t even use this enormous building to gather on a Sunday morning and worship the Lord. We worshiped by Zoom while the building sat empty. That in itself was some kind of revelation, to use a biblical term.
We offered the building for sale. To our amazement, it was snapped up quickly by another congregation at a very fair price.
Suddenly—SHAZAM!—we were awash in cash. We had no money worries for the first time in anyone’s memory.
But now we had a different problem. Covid was over. Masks were becoming optional, then rare. Life was back to normal, sort of. And we had no place to meet in person. We deeply yearned to meet again with our loved brothers and sisters face-to-face.
We rented a storefront in the conveniently-named Heritage Square strip mall. We chose the location because it was central and available. The echo of our church name was just a stroke of good fortune.
Our storefront worship space.
We thought the storefront would be a temporary location. But you know, we like our new space. We’re in no hurry to move on. For the next few years at least, we can afford the rent.
Free of the institutional concerns that used to tie us in knots, we have begun to relax.
We concentrate now on simply holding good, restorative worship services in our new space. Our music director, Robert Eversman, has even built a small pipe organ into our little storefront, making it seem kind of churchy, if you know what I mean. He gets a good sound out of it, too.
There is a small kitchenette, adequate for staging our weekly after-worship coffee and refreshments—a key hallmark of our fellowship.
And some wonderful things have happened:
The Madison Theater Guild, always hungry for rehearsal space, discovered us. We have hosted their rehearsals for three plays in the last year or so, and they’ll be rehearsing Arsenic and Old Lace at Heritage on weekday evenings early in 2025. We don’t charge any rent or facility use fee. We’re just glad there is something nice we can do for the community.
Some folks who enjoy line dancing use our space on Tuesday afternoons. There is a mah-jong club on Wednesday afternoons. A women’s bridge club may start using our space as well. It’s nice these groups can enjoy a cozy and comfortable space for the things they like to do.
Has all this activity increased our membership? No. But that’s no longer what we’re about.
The church is becoming relevant to our community.
We collect items for a nearby food pantry, and one of our pastors delivers them there on a frequent basis. Some members volunteer there. It’s something we can do for our neighbors.
Pinball machines in the back room.
One of our members enjoys rebuilding or reconditioning old pinball machines. He places them in commercial spaces where they generate a bit of revenue. It’s a side gig for him, outside of his regular job. He was running out of space in his basement to store machines, so we said, “Sean, why don’t you put a couple of machines here?” So he did. We don’t know what we’re going to do with them, but there they are. What will God do with them?
Who knows what comes next? We’re in an experimental frame of mind.
We do not need to hammer our church into a success story. God might plan for our church to die. If so, he hasn’t told us.
Food supply is one way we have been entrusted to feed his sheep. Play rehearsals, line dancing, mah-jong, bridge, and pinballs might also be ways to feed His sheep.
We don’t know and we don’t need to know.
We are calm. We are patient. We are methodical.
We are full of faith, hope, and love.
We’re just doing our thing.
Could that ever add up to the voice of God in somebody’s busy, distracted, vexed, and bewildered life?
You can be born in Amherst, live in Amherst, and die in Amherst. You can go to your grave unheralded.
And then some interfering busybody will publish your poems, and you’ll be famous. Even rich, though only in absentia because by that time, you’ll be . . . elsewhere.
Dear Reader, I am no Emily Dickinson. I find it necessary to promote my own writings while I am still here.
Not that it will make me famous or rich. But I would like somebody to read what I have written.
This is especially true of a little book called Izzy Strikes Gold!, published in July 2024. My second novel. The one nearest my heart.
If you wish to dismiss it, you may call it a middle-grade novel, because that means only pre-teen children should read it.
But here’s a news flash: I wrote it for everybody.
Izzy Mahler is a bright and inquisitive lad, age twelve, the class shrimp in a small Midwestern town. Not everything is going well in his life, but he’s accumulating friends—one by one, almost without being aware of it. And he has private knowledge of a hoard of shiny metal. That could be gold, and gold could help.
The story is set in the Sometimes-But-Not-Always Fabulous Fifties, which lends it a certain charm for those who remember the era, or a sense of wonder for those who have never been there. The kids who inhabit the Fifties are just like kids now—only in a gentler world.
Izzy Strikes Gold! is a charming, sometimes sad, but always honest look at growing up in America, then or now.
It is what we used to call a coming-of-age story.
Did I mention it builds to a Christmastime climax?
This story is too good to be restricted to middle-schoolers. You can read it too.
Izzy Strikes Gold! is a book for anyone who was ever twelve years old, or ever will be. You can read it with your grandchildren.
We here at World Headquarters of the Society for the Belated Appreciation of Artist Peco Yeh pride ourselves on staying abreast of recent developments. By “staying abreast,” we mean, in this case, “only recently made aware.”
I refer thus to a pair of early November emails from attorney-at-law Antonia Lonquist.
In what can only be called a flippant disregard of professional norms, attorney Antonia has not filed suit against the society or me, Your New Favorite Writer.
Rather, she begs to inform us that she is the owner of this painting by our Old Favorite Painter:
Antonia’s canvas.
“I am fascinated,” Antonia wrote on November 6, “by the different styles Peco has used in his paintings that you displayed in your post. I feel it gives my piece a new perspective to see the other styles in his works.”
As you and I know full well, Dear Reader, Mister Yeh—who held forth in Taipei in the 1960s and 1970s at least, and perhaps in other decades as well—flaunted his talent in quite a variety of different styles. His brush-strokes, composition, subject matter, and even, one might say, his basic artistic approach varied widely from one canvas to the next.
It was as if he was not satisfied to paint only one way when there was a whole world of ways to paint.
In an earlier email, Antonia explained how she came into possession of her genuine Peco Yeh painting: “My aunt was cleaning out her house this past weekend and gave me a painting my father had purchased for her some time ago while he was stationed overseas. My father was stationed in Vietnam and Cambodia during the war and would spend time on R&R in Taiwan, Thailand, and other Asian countries. He must have purchased the painting on a trip then.”
I, Dear Reader, happened to be stationed on Taiwan in 1967—possibly even at the same time Antonia’s father visited there on Rest and Recreation Leave.
It was on Chung Shan Pei Lu (Chung Shan North Road) in Taipei that I met Peco Yeh and purchased from him the painting below, which has been seen before on this site.
My Peco.
It’s easy to see that Antonia’s painting and mine have something in common. Both are waterscapes. Peco told me that mine represented a scene on Taipei’s local river, the Tamsui. I don’t know the fancied locale of the watery scene in Antonia’s painting, but it’s not unreasonable to think it is also the Tamsui.
In any case, it hardly matters. Each is really a universal scene. Each could depict any waterway in East Asia. The composition in Antonia’s painting is what I would call eccentric or idiosyncratic. The lighting is contrasty, the brushwork what I would call blocky. It looks like at least part of it was done not with a brush at all but with a palette knife.
Mine, on the other hand, is more traditional or even conventional in composition and brush style. It harkens back more than a thousand years to the great landscape works of the Song dynasty.
I like mine better, but there’s much to be said for Antonia’s canvas, in terms of mental challenge, frenzy, and ferment.
These two paintings exist within a spectrum of other paintings by the same artist, not all of them water scenes. If you have an interest in Peco’s work, you can see those that have come to my attention by searching “Peco Yeh” in the search box at upper right. There are, to date, five posts which have paintings by Peco.
Thanks very much to Antonia Lonquist and other correspondents who have brought forth Peco Yeh canvases for our enjoyment.
Saturday, I will rise at zero-dark-thirty and fly to Washington, D.C., on Badger Honor Flight Mission #57.
Honor flights, in case you don’t know, are group excursions by veterans to view the nation’s monuments and memorials in a context of pomp, circumstance, and profuse gratitude for their military service.
I never imagined I would take part in such a thing.
My father, an infantryman in the Southwest Pacific during the Second World War, would have qualified for an honor flight, but it never occurred to me to sign him up; and then he died.
I was only dimly aware that honor flights were a thing. If I knew of honor flights at all, I had heard of them only as a new thing, a phenomenon of the last twenty years.
You probably know, Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer is suspicious of new things.
I’m also suspicious of events which, and people who, make a big deal of military service. During my time in the Air Force, 1965-1969, I was never an enthusiastic Zoomie. I have not been active in veterans’ affairs since then.
Going on an honor flight would have been a bizarre thought for me.
But my friend, the late Jerry Paulsen, went. He was an Army vet. His wife, Mary, also served in the Army, so the two were able to go together on the Badger Honor Flight. It turned out to be a life-changing experience for them.
After the Paulsens returned from their honor flight, Jerry started hounding me to sign up for a flight myself.
But I don’t do what people say just because they nag.
So, why did I sign up? I’ll try to explain.
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“Honor” is a conspicuous word. It is the first word in the phrase “honor flight.” Maybe it’s used in the verbal sense, meaning the event is intended to honor the veterans who take part.
But “honor” also has another sense, a noun sense. It’s an old-fashioned meaning we don’t hear much about these days. Honor is a traditional virtue that was thought to be indispensable to a man’s character.
Honor was applied to women, too, but it accrued on different accounts in the reckoning of the two sexes.
For men, honor was tied to valor and to unswerving loyalty demonstrated in battle. Though honesty and integrity are at its heart, the virtue of honor speaks with a martial accent. War is what commonly delineates male virtue, and our nation has generally provided one war per generation.
Some men get born too late for one war, too early for the next. But most men get the opportunity to fight for their country. Some live in times when they can hardly escape it. It is not only how they acquit themselves in battle, but even how they meet the routine challenges of military life, that brightens or stains their escutcheon of honor.
Honor used to be a powerful motivator. In the Civil War, men did not rush upon one another in thousands, bayonets fixed, and perish in blood and pain because they wanted to do so or because it was fun. Everyone, as Lincoln noted, would have preferred to avoid war. But when it overtook them, most able-bodied men found they could not stay out of it and keep their honor intact.
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates took death by poison rather than forfeit his honor as an Athenian. Socrates the philosopher explained to his friend Crito that Socrates the Athenian must obey the rulings of the city-state. If he was no Athenian, he could be no Socrates. This, although he does not use the word, was a form of honor.
Portrait of Grant around 1843, from a daguerreotype by an unknown photographer. Public Domain.
The young lieutenant Ulysses Grant, convinced the 1846-1848 war with Mexico was an injustice done to a weaker neighbor to serve the political needs of the pro-slavery Democratic party, nevertheless followed orders and went. He was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army. To withdraw on the eve of war would amount to dishonor.
Winston Churchill—a chesty man, never known to back away from a fight—told the boys at Harrow School in 1941: “Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” (My emphasis.) Honor, Churchill seemed to say, would have you fight, fight, and never give in, exceptwhen honor itself happened to require the opposite.
Churchill in 1941. Photograph by Yousuf Karsh. Public Domain.
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Since Churchill’s time, honor has been steeply discounted.
We no longer covet honor. We no longer talk about honor. We no longer predicate our acts on conceptions of honor.
Still, there is residue. In World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Desert Storm, the U.S. forces were constituted of men who answered to the concept of honor, whether or not it was stated as such.
By the time of the Vietnam involvement, Americans no longer uniformly believed our national honor depended on fighting a war—at least, not this war—or that it was worth the effort and risk of doing so. Thousands of young men fled to Canada or went into hiding in the United States.
I had no wish to fight in a war, or even to serve in uniform, but events gave me little choice. I was soon to be drafted, which meant I would serve in the Army or the Marine Corps.
I chose to enlist in the Air Force. It seemed like a better deal.
At the time, widespread public opposition to the Vietnam War was just starting to get organized.
But six months later, while I was still in training at the Presidio of Monterey, California, rejection of uniformed service had become a real thing. One guy I knew lodged a belated application to be treated as a conscientious objector. Another simply ran off—deserted. Antiwar activists hung around military bases, cultivating friendships with young enlisted men and offering options for clandestine flight.
The opportunity to simply duck out of the war had become real. It could be done. It was an option we all had to address.
I stayed the course. Not because I was brave. Not because I was patriotic. Because, rather, I could identify with Socrates, who chose to remain an Athenian in good standing. I wanted to keep on being an American. I would not have expressed that as honor, but looking back from sixty years on, perhaps it was.
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The young men who fought the Vietnam War sometimes endured taunts and jeers when they came home. I did not experience such things, but many did.
Previously, when Johnny came marching home, he had been received with honor, even with brass bands and parades. But combatants in the Vietnam War were made to feel like inferior life forms. That war and its consequences undermined the caliber and morale of the armed services. President Nixon reached an agreement with the North Vietnamese which amounted to surrender but was termed “peace with honor.” Everybody just wanted to get the hell out.
Then fifteen years passed—a mere eye-blink—and our nation again needed well-trained, capable, and loyal forces, for operations against Iraq. Our leaders resolved that this time around, the troops would be celebrated, would be given dignity and respect. And so, by and large, they were.
There came a general rise in patriotic feeling and a restored regard for military men. These trends were bolstered by our national response to the events of September 11, 2001. All veterans, not just those of Desert Storm, basked in the elevated profile of military service.
In 2004, a National World War II Memorial was built in Washington, D.C. Living veterans of that war were getting older, reaching the end of life; so volunteer organizations sprang up to whisk World War II veterans to Washington so they could see their memorial. This project grew into a nationwide network, which is now active in forty-five states.
As members of the Greatest Generation slipped off to their final rewards, the Honor Flight network began including younger veterans in the trips, Korean- and Vietnam-era vets.
I was dimly aware of all these things. But then Jerry Paulsen came back from his honor flight and began harping at me to sign up. So one day, I idly went to the Badger Honor Flight web page to see how the whole thing worked. What I saw there transformed my attitude.
The honor flight protocol assigns each honored veteran a volunteer “guardian,” a younger person at his elbow throughout the trip. According to the website, “We do this for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” Maybe they want to give needed assistance to aged and infirm veterans yet do not wish to create a distinction between those and the healthier vets.
The key fact to me was that the guardian, though he or she cannot be the veteran’s spouse, can be a family member. I thought of our only child—our daughter, Katie.
Katie is a very bright young woman, now in her late forties, with children of her own and an important job with the State of Wisconsin. Through no fault of her own, she was born after the brouhaha surrounding the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam was all over. She had never lived in a time of war. The Gulf War and the Global War on Terror had come along, of course, when she was an adult—but they had little effect on her personally.
If I went on this trip and took Katie as my guardian—I knew she would do that for her old man—she would receive a precious opportunity to mingle for a day, a meaningful day, with a lot of old men all focused on key events of their young lives. These men might tell stories. They might reveal how things were in those old days.
At the very least, she would experience a certain group reverence and team spirit among a body of men and women who may not all have been in battle, but all of whom have a DD Form 214 in their pockets and know how to use a P-38 government-issue can opener. I thought that when all these guys and gals pay hushed respects at monuments and memorials to their fallen brothers and sisters, Katie might sense that something important was involved.
She might get a glimpse of honor cherished and salvaged, by being among folks grown old in body but still engaged in vexing moments that once occupied their young lives. “. . . made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
For that alone—to give her that opportunity—it will be worth the trip.
Have no fear of missing out, Gentle Reader: I’ll bloviate my impressions of the actual thing next week in this spot, Lord willing.
It’s headed back to the 80s now, but we had a cold snap a couple of days ago. Daytime highs in the 60s, down to the low 40s at night.
That was First Notice. This happens almost every year in late August or early September.
My back-fence neighbor is firing up his grill again, so hardy is his hope. But summer will soon expire, and there is nothing you can do about it. Portents of autumn are everywhere.
A cheeky squirrel. Photo by Charles J. Sharp, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Sparrows and starlings have begun to flock. Twenty or so turkeys marched down our block this morning. More than half were this year’s poults.
Thousands of squirrels have jacked up their metabolisms. They’re getting cheeky. One ran right up to me this afternoon as I sat in my lawn chair reading. When he belatedly saw me for what I am, he retreated only a few feet and made a narrow circle around me.
This is no time for a squirrel to be faint of heart. The harvest is upon us.
Our raspberries—slim pickins back in June and July—now look like making a bumper crop of luscious red fruit in the September cycle. That’s assuming the weather holds. We could have highs in the 80s for a couple more weeks, maybe even three or four. And we’ll keep getting berries until there’s a hard frost at night. That could be sometime in October, if we’re lucky.
What we’re experiencing now, by the way, is not Indian Summer. That comes later, in the fall, if there should happen to be a warm spell after the frost comes. Right now, we’re still in summer.
But summer’s lease, as the Bard of Avon reminds us, hath all too short a date.
Those football guys are kicking their oblate spheroids again, so it’s only a matter of time before the hammer comes down for good.
Izzy Strikes Gold!, my middle-grade coming-of-age adventure set in the wilds of 1957, is already proving popular with readers ages 9-12 and with their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Modesty prohibits my mentioning the fabulous review recently received from Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer for the Midwest Book Review, but you can read it for yourself here.
Don’t miss out—get your copy now! If you savor the independent bookstore experience, wander into Mystery to Me, 1863 Monroe Street, Madison, Wis., or Literatus & Co., 401 E. Main, Watertown, Wis.—both of which have signed copies available. Or order it online and, if you’d like it signed, email me at larryfsommers@gmail.com, and we’ll get it done one way or another.
We now return to regularly scheduled programming:
Whither, Whence, or Howcome Peco Yeh?
If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, perhaps you will recall that in May 2019 I mentioned a lovely oil painting, a waterscape, that I had the good fortune to acquire more than fifty years ago, at a scandalously low price, directly from its source, Chinese painter Peco Yeh. In February 2023, I reposted the same piece, just as a remembrance.
My Peco Yeh painting.
Peco was a strange man—a sort of nebbish, to use a dated term—and I sometimes feel guilty about paying him so little for what is, in my eyes, a fine work of art. It’s too late to make amends, for Peco would be long since dead, but in a fine bit of poetic justice, this blog site has become—without conscious intention on my part—World Headquarters for the Retrospective Appreciation of Peco Yeh by Owners of His Scattered Canvases.
It came about in this way: In August 2023, six months after my repeat post displaying my Peco Yeh canvas, I got an email from Earline Dirks, who was in possession of a much different painting by Peco. Then Joshua Lowe of West Virginia chimed in with his own Peco canvas. And after several months’ silence, I heard from Jane Upchurch, who has a different work altogether.
Earline’s Peco Yeh painting.
Joshua’s Peco Yeh painting
Jane’s Peco Yeh painting.
Look up Peco Yeh, Dear Reader. I dare you. All you will find is a rather cryptic, 56-word thumbnail bio that bounces endlessly around the Internet, completely unattributed. It paints a rather romantic picture of the soft-spoken little man’s life and background, but who is to say whether it is true?
What is indisputable is that Peco lived—I met him in person and have heard from others who did also—and painted a number of canvases. The more of his paintings I see, the more I am struck by the variety of his works. In style, in manner, in subject matter, and in quality, they seem to be all over the map. One might even suspect the name “Peco Yeh” got attrributed to several different artists, but I don’t think so. I think he was simply interested in different approaches at different times and was, in general, an enigma.
A number of his paintings are available at online art sites. And for better or worse, I seem to be the repository of a fair number of images by, and stories about, Peco Yeh from private persons who own some of his works.
So it seems that duty calls. Far be it from me to shirk.
The Latest Report
A couple of weeks ago I heard from Michael Tomczyk, who said, “I was dating a Taiwanese girl in 1972 who was a friend of Peco Yeh. He had a small gallery where I met him several times and selected and purchased these 3 paintings which are I think are some of his best.”
Here are Michael’s paintings, so you can judge for yourself.
Michael also sent along the following poem, which he composed:
IN MEMORY OF PECO YEH
There once was an artist named Peco Yeh,
Who painted scenes in an extaordinary way;
He lived in Taipei and his art was well known,
He always painted using sepia tone.
The scenes he painted were classic Chinese;
When we view them today they put our spirits at ease.
–by Michael Tomczyk
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All I can say, as a sort of informal custodian of a Chinese artist’s memory, is, “Peco, where will you strike next?”
Thanks, Gentle Reader, for letting me get that off my chest.
Long ago there lived a boy beleaguered by the world. Everything was a potential threat. Bullies and demons lurked everywhere.
Grownups were no help; they had their own problems. It was better to keep your head down.
If life was good, why were so many people so sad?
The more he learned, the more confused he became. By the time he was a teenager, he was downright bewildered.
This boy came into adulthood a bundle of neuroses and labored through the next decades to unlearn misconceptions about life and gradually to attain the art of contentment.
The Long View
When he grew old and retired from work, when no longer besieged by the trials of midlife, the boy looked back on the whole span of his life. Oddly enough, recent years had become a messy blur; but he saw the childhood era with crystalline precision.
He saw much of pain and sorrow, but even more of joy and zest. He wanted to stand before his Maker and say, “Oh . . . now I see how this caused that, and how one thing led to another. . . .” Above all, he wanted to have it all make sense.
But it didn’t. It was just a life. No matter whan angle he took, no matter which way he looked at it, there was nothing in his growing up that explained how he had arrived at grownup responsibilities with such a skewed, anxiety-ridden outlook that it took all his life to get over it. There was no rational understanding of that.
Well, that wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot.
Writing Therapy
When the boy decided to try being a serious writer, his dearest project became a reconstruction of that bygone era—one in which the joys and sorrows of a rather ordinary childhood balanced out and cast a benign new understanding across the mind-screen of the past. He would write a story where the forlorn hopes and muddled yearnings that lingered in his soul across all the intervening years could find a comfortable home at last.
And, after a great deal of work, this strange project proved possible!
The catch was (there’s always a catch, ask Yossarian)—the catch was, it wouldn’t be the boy’s actual life. Oh, all the incidents of childhood would be there, accurately portrayed in an exact replica of the original setting; yes, of course, a few names would be changed to protect the innocent, as the announcer on “Dragnet” used to say; but every detail would be true. They would just be juxtaposed in such a way that there was a veiled form of causality. The things that happened in the story would have meanings that related to one another, and those meanings would form themes, and the whole thing would be immensely satisfying.
It would be a fiction. But satisfying.
Isn’t that why we tell stories, Gentle Reader? To resurrect our past, but in a better way?
The story became a book, Izzy Strikes Gold!, about a twelve-year-old boy living in a small town in the 1950s. Izzy has to try to keep his family together, but what he most wants to do is fit in with his schoolmates. And all the adjustments he has to make to reconcile those conflicting goals give him an opportunity to grow a larger perspective.
The Fifties are so long ago now that the book counts as historical fiction. It’s also, as a matter of form, what we call a coming-of-age story (or a bildungsroman when we’re being snooty and pretending we know German). From a bookseller’s perspective, it is a middle-grade novel, because it’s axiomatic that a story about a twelve-year-old boy must be targeted at nine-to-twelve-year-old readers. Yet, as someone who remembers the Fifties quite clearly, I must tell you this book is a Nostalgic’s delight. Grandparents will enjoy it as much as their grandchildren.
It came about simply because a boy grew up confused and was left with unsatisfactory longings.
Whooppee!
I am sworn to secrecy on the identity of the boy, but if you’d like to meet him and hear about his journey as an author, boy and man, and maybe even buy a copy of the book and get it signed,and maybe win a fabulous, Fifties-themed door prize, I commend you to the Izzy Strikes Gold! Launch Party, 6:00 p.m. Wednesday, July 24.
Kindly old Mrs. Winders kept me after class one Friday afternoon in October. She sat me down by the dusty chalk rail and said next Monday morning I must report to the room across the hall.
Dazed by this announcement, I walked home. Skipping a grade was nothing I had heard of before. I didn’t know it could be done.
I told the news to Mom. She knew all about it. She, Dad, the teachers, the principal, and the school psychologist had already talked at length about this plan to make me a fourth-grader.
The only one left out of the conversation was me.
So What Else Is New?
It would have been extraordinary to include a kid in a decision that affected him.
We were to be seen rather than heard. Why would anyone consult us on a matter of importance? We were defective; that is, not yet adult.
“But Mom, I like my friends in third grade. Those fourth-graders are older than me. I don’t know them.”
“You’ll just have to make new friends.”
That was that.
The next Monday, I walked into a classroom where all the kids towered over me.
Where everybody already knew their multiplication tables.
Students practicing penmanship. Fair use.
Where the cursive characters—which I had barely begun to learn—were posted above the blackboards all around the room, from which vantage point they leered, taunted, and dared me to write using them all the time. And to practice “good penmanship,” whatever that was.
Fourth grade was a place where my new teacher, a mean old lady with beady eyes, saw me as an untutored savage, a burden thrust upon her.
Oh, the Humanity
Van Gogh suffering from an earache. Public Domain.
People say artists must suffer. If they never suffered, it’s not art.
Writers are held to be artists. Therefore we must have suffered too.
In this business of suffering I am also defective. I haven’t suffered much. At age seventy-nine, I look back on a life of tranquillity, prosperity, and more than my share of joy.
But in those days when I was an impostor posing as a fourth-grader—both smaller and younger than my classmates, resented by my harsh teacher, expected to know all sorts of things I had sped past in this oddball promotion—at that time, Dear Reader, if at no other, I thought I was suffering.
Making friends was the least of it. My classmates treated me as a novelty—a mid-season interloper with an overgrown brain and an undergrown body. At least they were nice. They showed a kind of mascot-worthy toleration. One or two offered real friendship.
Some other kid, with a different personality, might have used the sudden promotion to take fourth grade by storm. Some folks are outgoing, potentially meteoric, by nature. I am not one of them.
Years and decades have taught me versatility; the skills required to make new friends quickly; the ability to assert my own interests in a pleasant, no-nonsense way so I won’t be huddled in a dark corner when goodies are distributed. But way down deep, I’m still an introvert.
Timidity ruled me in third and fourth grades. I seemed born to be bullied.
“Stand up for yourself,” my parents said.
Now, I know what they meant. Then, I had no clue.
My path to a full social life may have been gradual, but I got here. Gone are my days of quailing and quaking. Life is now good to me.
Yet the wounds of childhood, even many years later, can still sting.
An Altered Ego
So there was a hidden agenda when I set out, a few years ago, to write fiction.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. --T. S. Eliot
I thought through historical fiction—stories set in the past—I could fix the past.
I created a character, Izzy Mahler—a six-year-old boy, beleaguered by schoolyard bullies who shook him down for money, a dime he did not have. “You’d better get it,” said big bully Barton Bigelow.
Izzy’s first, forlorn appearance, from the Saturday Evening Post’s Depression-era art files. Fair use.
The ingenious means by which Izzy got the dime, warded off Barton Bigelow, scored a candy prize for himself, and learned a lesson in finance, became a fount of quaint humor. The Saturday Evening Post website liked the story well enough to publish it as “Nickel and Dime.”
By combining a couple of real incidents from early childhood—changing a few names, facts, and relationships—I had given Izzy a success that had eluded the actual me. How’s that for exploration, T. S. Eliot?
Two more Izzy stories, again bought by The Saturday Evening Post, showcased my flair for creative reconstruction of the past.
Then I caught the bug to write The Great American Novel. My great American novel, Price of Passage, took about five years to complete. All along, I had it in mind to write a book about Izzy’s grade-school experiences back in the 1950s.
And I did it. The result, Izzy Strikes Gold!, is a middle-grade novel that grandparents will also enjoy reading—as a dip into the roseate past, if nothing more.
It’s 1957. Twelve-year-old IZZY, long on hope and short on cash, claws golden nuggets from the waters of a secret spring. His co-discoverer COLLUM swears him to secrecy.
Izzy hopes to be a regular kid, not just the class shrimp. Half his brain teems with schemes to fit in with his peers, while the other half struggles to keep his family from falling apart.
MOM and DAD are at odds, Izzy helpless to save their marriage. THE RUSSIANS launch the first artificial satellite, blighting Izzy’s hopes of space-age glory. Bullying LYLE dashes Izzy’s self-image; breathtaking IRMA seems oblivious to his wistful ardor; and GRANDPA, who taught him to be brave, wastes away in a hospital room.
Money could ease these woes—but Izzy has pledged silence about the gold in the hidden spring.
DEEP IN DILEMMAS, HOW CAN IZZY HOLD ON TO HOPE?
Because it features a child protagonist with a child’s problems, this book is classified by booksellers as a middle-grade novel—one meant for readers eight to twelve years old.
But, Dear Reader, I wrote it for EVERYBODY. I hope there’s enough universality in Izzy’s story that people of any age can enjoy it as a snapshot of a magical time in a child’s life. People my age, who can remember the very different world of the 1950s, will resonate with the events contained in its pages.
I hope they will give this book to their grandchildren—read it along with their grandchildren, perhaps. It may spark wonderful conversations.
Themes
Authors must talk with people about their work. It’s easy to talk about characters and events in a story you have written. It’s harder to talk about themes.
You may not know the themes until the dust has settled.
Long before starting on the Izzy novel, I shared with my friend Christine DeSmet the fact that I wanted to write a “coming-of-age” book which would be mainly about “acceptance.” That desire sprang from the many times I suffered anxiety, hoping my classmates would accept me as a true peer even though I was younger and smaller, and knew bigger words.
But when the book was finished, I found its main themes are hope, friendship, and love.
All these transcend mere acceptance. In fact, taken together, they make acceptance unnecessary.
I thought I wrote about a child’s struggle to be tolerated in juvenile society. What came out was a saga of hope tenaciously held, friendship slowly gained, and love made manifest.
I went in for a penny but came out with a pound.
Having arrived where I started, I knew the place for the first time.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
P.S.—If you’re in or near Madison, Wisconsin, on July 24, come to the FABULOUS LAUNCH PARTY. You can buy the book on site and get a genuine author’s signature on the title page. Details here.
